


two steps on the water

by arbitrarily



Category: The Great (TV 2020)
Genre: Canon-Typical Historical Anachronisms, Chocolate Box Treat, Episode Tag, F/M, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Unresolved Sexual Tension
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-14
Updated: 2021-02-14
Packaged: 2021-03-13 10:34:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,306
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28652085
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/arbitrarily/pseuds/arbitrarily
Summary: Some wounds heal better than others.
Relationships: Archbishop "Archie" & Marial (The Great TV 2020), Archbishop "Archie"/Marial (The Great TV 2020)
Comments: 10
Kudos: 11
Collections: Chocolate Box - Round 6





	two steps on the water

**Author's Note:**

  * For [LearnedFoot](https://archiveofourown.org/users/LearnedFoot/gifts).



> Title from Kate Bush's "Hounds of Love."
> 
> This is set immediately following the events in episode 1.02 "The Beard," namely, Marial's punishment. The prompts in your letter for these two cracked open a corner of my mind I had no idea existed, and I thank you for that! I hope you enjoy, and Happy Chocolate Box!

There is no end to her indignity. While Marial has learned much since she was slapped down to servitude—the logistics of laundry; blistered hands as a result of the laundry; that the laundry never fucking ends, she is Sisyphus with cracked and ruined hands—it is this parade of unceasing affronts that persists in educating her. And tonight, her instruction continues apace: there is not a comfortable position that exists in this sorry excuse for a bed to accommodate a mildly flayed open back.

To add insult to already grievous injury, her fellow inmate has already begun to snore.

Marial is sitting stiffly, upright in bed, engaged in her favored idle pastime—homicidal speculation, the target of such attention shifting like the spokes in a rolling wheel from the Emperor to her father to Orlo to the snoring body slumbering along the opposite wall—when the door slams open.

Marial lifts her eyebrows in mock surprise. “Well, good evening to you as well.” Archie fills the doorway to the point that he very nearly has to stoop. He looks from Marial to her startled and scarcely awake roommate.

“You are dismissed,” he says to her, all the command of the Church and the history of both the Patriarch and male entitlement crowded behind each word.

“Eh? This is my room?”

“A fact of which I would not boast. And while this might be the scope of your domain, I, for one, speak the word of God.” With two fingers he swoops a gesture to the door. “Out.”

“He commands you gone, foul spirit,” Marial hisses. She relishes it more than she’d ever admit to Archie, let alone God, that through her intimacies and acquaintances she still has but a little weight to throw around.

Muttering, with a wary eye fixed on Archie, only to shoot a glare at Marial that promises future retaliation, she exits.

Archie shuts the door behind him and he steps into the poorly lit room. The lone lit candle gutters and threatens to snuff itself out. The shadows crowd them; they might as well be in a cave.

“Had I known you moonlit as security, I’d have had you by to what passes for my humble abode far more often.”

He ignores her. Archie has many flaws—many, _many_ flaws—but it is this that irritates her most: when he puts his mind to it, he is very good at pretending he cannot hear her. Well, it irritates her the most beneath the obvious, the piousness, the self-righteousness. The beard.

Instead, Archie sighs heavily. In the candlelight his eyes are very dark and soft. Caring, even. “Are you alright?”

Marial doesn’t know precisely why she finds the question, and moreover the affection behind it, unexpected. Despite everything, Archie is hardly what one might call uninterested and unconcerned when it specifically comes to her. Still, she scoffs. “In which capacity might you refer? Spiritually? Carnally? Mentally?” She pulls a sour face.

“Physically, of course. Don’t play at daft with me, you’re anything but stupid. I saw your back.”

“Oh, that.” She waves her hand, the gesture far more casual than her careful position upon the bed. Anything less than ramrod straight makes her flesh pull and burn. "As I am sure anyone who has ever met me would tell you, I was asking for it.”

“Marial.”

“Archie.”

He makes that face he often makes in her presence where he is either asking for patience from up on high or where one might inter the body of a dead servant girl and escape notice. The latter isn’t entirely fair; he’s far more likely to send her to a convent than kill her. The oddest thing about him, the oddest feature of anyone in Peter the Cunt’s court, is that more often than not, Archie’s faith is genuine. A true believer is a dangerous one, fanged and tethered to something far less governable than favor or political ambition. He strives for those things too—of course he does; he still has his head attached and most like values it enough to wish to keep it longer still—but, well, God, and all that.

Marial has faith in very little, if in anything at all.

“Now,” she continues, "if all you’ve come to offer me is your pity, please know I have no interest in receiving it.” Her mouth twists. "Though, good God in heaven, wouldn’t you be but hard-pressed to provide it.”

“You think so uncharitably of me.” Archie steps closer, to the edge of the bed. He wags a finger at her. “This is your trouble, you know. You have such a jaundiced view of the world, Marial, and it rarely matches with reality. You keep at this, you will rattle your cage constantly and never know peace—”

“If I, what? Don’t lie down and bare my neck for breaking? I prefer to keep my fists raised lest I forget myself.” No use in reiterating the fact that forgetting her station, though never herself, is what earned her such a beating in the first place.

She watches as tension seeps out of Archie. His posture slumps as he looks down at her. “My dear, but how you live to antagonize.”

She grins. It doesn't quite reach her eyes. “Part of my charm.”

He nods towards her. “Let me see.”

When her eyebrows lift this time, her surprise is actual and earned. “Begging your pardon?”

“Are we playing dumb again? Take down your shift and let me see.”

Her mouth lifts, too. “You horny devil.”

“Don’t be cute.”

“I cannot help my nature.”

“Let me see what’s been done to you.”

He never uses his official voice with her. He is never the Archbishop to her, only Archie. That is no less true now. His authority is one she has always challenged, his will nowhere near as indomitable with her as he would have it, and when he speaks to her now it is with a long-familiar frustrated whine. She cannot help but tease him further. “Would you care for a little show, is that it? Though, I should warn you, my nipples are nowhere near as small as yours. Teeny tiny, yours are.”

“Everything with you is—” He halts and shakes his head. Archie mutters something unintelligible beneath his breath, Marial able to catch the words _impudent_ and maybe _wench_. It is in the spirit of both that she turns her back to him and lets her nightshift pool around her waist.

The room was chilled while clothed and she shivers despite herself, even as she resists the urge to fold her arms over her chest. Her back must look as raw and abused as it feels; she can hear Archie suck in air past his teeth as much as she can feel his closer approach. Her skin prickles, more from the cold, she tells herself, than his scrutiny.

The thin mattress barely moves as he settles onto it, behind her. She can feel the brush of his robes against her, pooling about the both of them. Marial curls her fingers into the pallet. He does not touch her. If he was a crueler man, she thinks, if he was _her_ , he might poke at her welts. He doesn’t.

Instead, he sighs, yet again.

“You will not tell me the hand that dealt this?”

“Nope. And lest you consider this an invitation to further questioning, I am averse to making a game of it. I am really very tired.”

He leans closer to her. She can feel his breath on her, hot, a sharp contrast to the frigid room that makes her want to fidget. She holds herself still.

Marial startles when his fingers reach and brush her long braid over her shoulder. The tips of his fingers pass over the nape of her neck and her stomach clenches.

“Does it hurt you much?”

“Oh, it’s a veritable summer’s picnic back there, pleasant as green grass, good vodka, a better fuck.”

“I ask with sincerity.”

“Of course it fucking hurts, I can’t even lie down.”

He makes a soft murmuring sound, which technically means nothing at all, but for her is oddly comforting. It’s better than anything else he might have to say to her.

One derives much grace in suffering. He told her that, in the midst of everything. Her father had ruined the family, her father had ruined her life, and in the scant moments before she was shoved into servants’ garb and delivered here, she had run to Archie. She is not above admitting that she begged, pleaded with him as she dropped to her knees, demanding he save her from this fate. And he had told her there was nothing he could do. God, but she could’ve killed him—and that afternoon, she had tried. He fought back easily and when he held her down he said to her, “One derives much grace in suffering.” He said it with the awe only a man could who pierced and burnt his flesh in a bid to put the fun in fundamentalism and equated a hard-on with the pain that inspired his blood to sing. Suffering, she knows, for Archie is less holy sacrament than perverse joy, the fucking masochist. Marial, for her troubles, always preferred to wield the switch rather than be smacked with it.

Enter her current aches and pains, she supposes.

“I do not like to see you this way.” He says it wrong, and by that she means free of malice and loaded with far more gentleness than anyone in this palace has any right to give let alone receive.

“Ah, yes. Now if only my impoverished circumstances moved you similarly, and to personally advantageous action, well. I’d be in business.”

“You ask too much, Marial.” He is touching her hair again, where it has come loose from the plait. She can feel it in her scalp each time his fingers catch in the snarled strands.

“Of that I am all too fucking aware, cousin.” She must have lent her own measure of emotion to her tone too because Archie untangles his fingers from her hair. He presses the flat of his hand to her, firm against the center of her back. Her bare skin receives his warmth, and it is terrible. He is as gentle with her as his voice was, even if the slightest pressure upon her flesh is enough to make her gasp, bite down against the sound. She aches, god how she aches, both physically and deeper still. Anger not only nourishes but it bleeds a person; it feeds a thin gruel as it drains, leaves a hollow in its wake.

The pressure of his hand lessens and then is gone. Before she can find a way to embarrass herself—ask him touch her, that’s what she would do—she feels the light drag of his fingers up and down her back. Soothing her, as if a spooked horse. It’d be funnier, she thinks, if not for the next thought: an unbroken horse.

“You speak of rattling cages to me,” she says, her voice low, “as if there is anything else I might do with myself. Any other way for me to live. All I know now is the bite of iron against my hand, that my cage can only be opened through the willingness, the kindness,” she sneers, "of others and yet here I remain, trapped. Alone.”

Archie says nothing in reply. Instead, he presses his mouth to the bruised skin along her upper shoulder blade. For but a moment, she thinks she might understand him, more than a little. More than she would prefer. Within the pain, beneath his mouth, there is a delicious force attempting to crush her, exalt her, the expanding weight of it swelling within her chest. She exhales, the sound of it overloud, shaky and damning. That is decidedly not great. But the only thing Archie does with it is wrap his arm around her, holding her from behind. The flat of his hand settles above her breast.

Marial blinks quickly, trying to dismiss emotion. His hand against her is both comically large and surprisingly warm. She takes a deep breath in; his hand lifts and falls with her chest. His robes scratch at her back, and even with the discomfort, or perhaps because of it, she imagines him holding her longer still. She imagines flesh on flesh. She clears her throat.

“If you are using my misery as an excuse to cop a feel, you will find my tits scant inches below.”

With an all too characteristic grumbling, he releases her. As his hand falls away, the back of it brushes against the swell of her breast. She shudders. He rises to his feet, towering above her.

Marial considers the shift still bunched around her waist. She leaves it there and turns around to face him. His gaze settles hotly on her bared breasts before returning to her face. His face is drawn, the low light cruel to his features.

“Pretend at happiness. That was your guidance for the Empress—will you suggest the same to me as well?”

“I would not dare.”

“What would you advise me do?” She prepares herself to hate him for what he might say next, but for the final time this evening, he manages to unman her.

“I thought that much should be obvious, cousin. You use your mule-headed stubbornness to your gain.” Archie takes the single step necessary to close the distance between them. He stands between her legs. His fingers press beneath her chin as he raises her face to his. He looks at her the way only a person can when they know the other too well, inside and out. “You do not let them break you.”


End file.
